In 1995, at the age of 42, Robert McCrum suffered a dramatic and near-fatal stroke, the subject of his acclaimed memoir 'My Year Off'. Ever since that life-changing event, McCrum has lived in the shadow of death, unavoidably aware of his own mortality. And now, 21 years on, he is noticing a change: his friends are joining him there. Death has become his contemporaries' every third thought. The question is no longer 'who am I?' but 'how long have I got?' and 'what happens next?'. With the words of McCrum's favourite authors as travel companions, 'Every Third Thought' takes us on a journey through a year and towards death itself. As he acknowledges his own and his friends' ageing, McCrum confronts an existential question: in a world where we have learnt to live well at all costs, can we make peace with what Freud calls 'the necessity of dying'?